Say It With GIFs: Expressing Your Book-Related Emotions With Internets

While we at the Riot take some time off to rest and catch up on our reading, we’re re-running some of our favorite posts from the last several months. Enjoy our highlight reel, and we’ll be back with new stuff on Monday, January 5th.

This post originally ran November 6, 2014.
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I can’t always get the word-making part of my ba-think-a-think to accurately reflect my feeling-having-area.

But that’s what gifs and memes and internet comics are for. To be honest, I’m not certain I even know how to write a thing anymore without resorting to captioned pictures of sloths. I’m also not sure if I mean ‘anymore’ or ‘any more’ in that context. I’VE BEEN OUT OF SCHOOL FOR A LONG TIME.

In case you, too, have been out of school for a long time and find your wordy bits failing you, I’ve compiled a pile of internet to help you say what you mean about the book in your hands.

When you suddenly realize you’re reading magical realism, and that there isn’t going to be any plausible reason for the man’s wife to, although an exact facsimile of his wife, not actually be his wife, and also he is corresponding with a scientist whom he and his wife invented but who turns out to be real but also dead, but also still somehow responding to email and living in Buenos Aires.

Any time a female protagonist starts talking about how she’s ‘not like other girls’ because she likes skateboarding or gaming or never played with dolls or whatever, OR CONTRARIWISE any time a female protagonist is like, Ugh, my unruly breasts and hideous bee-stung lips and long, coltish legs. How will I ever catch a man like this.

When someone like Dan Brown or John Grisham has put the fear of god into their editors and no one is brave enough to tell them to trim the fat, and you picture them all like:

Any time anyone is like, He did this totally innocuous-seeming thing and was later to very much wish he had not done that thing CHAPTER BREAK.

When you read anything Caitlin Moran has ever written about feminism or being a woman.

When the back of the book summary, reviews, and blurbs are completely misleading about how awesome a book is.

When the set-up and middle of a book are compelling, but the author runs out of ideas and wraps things up in like three heavily expositionary pages.

When fictional countries war with other fictional countries so that PAGES UPON PAGES are taken up with ‘And Uncton captured the Island of Marriot, which had been neutral since the Pact of Reddit, so Plaxxor retaliated by seizing the Bay of Comic Sans, which was the only harbor connecting Plaxxor City to the Adobe Strait.’

Anything written in second person.*

Any time anyone kills a dog.

William Faulkner.

When a legit main character legit dies.

Obviously and tragically, these only come in useful in online conversations. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been talking to someone in real life and wanted to be all, I’m super Shaq shoulder-dancing with cat gif about going home next week.